Do you like mail-in voting? I don’t. Maybe you don’t have it yet. A letter comes to your mailbox and inside is another envelope you mail back inside another envelope. Inside all of this is your vote. It sounds very secret and I’m sure it is, but the fun of voting day is lost.

I’m thinking today about Voting day, 1934. I may have the date wrong, but I don’t have the memory wrong. Voting Day was a real holiday to our family. Mom prepared a special meal for later on and they dressed up like it was Sunday. When Sonny and I got home from school, Dad sat us down and told us about voting. He said many people in other lands didn’t have the right to vote and we should never forget that. He said that freedom is so right for our country and we must never take our freedoms lightly. When we got old enough, we must always vote. Then they took us with them to the voting place. When we got home, Mom completed her meal and the Fredricksons came over to eat with us. It was a holiday!

It was a different kind of day and I’ve never forgotten what Voting Day was like when I was a little girl.  It certainly isn’t like a holiday today, Is it? I wonder if that isn’t the reason so many of our freedoms seem to be disappearing today. We don’t take our freedoms seriously any more. It seems Halloween has taken the place of Christmas and I don’t think we should take this and other things that are wrong. Why don’t we, who believe in freedom for America, all stand up together and say “We want our country back!”. I know there are many people who feel like I do, but we should say so.

I hope none of you threw that letter in your waste basket like it was junk mail. Even though we don’t honor the day like we used to, that letter is very important and you should know just which boxes you want to color. Don’t ever take your freedoms lightly. They just might disappear!

 

I have been reading The Circle Maker, by Mark Batterson and it has taught me not to pray as I have, but to pray without ceasing and to pray for what needs to happen, but praise Him for what He has already done in that prayer. That idea is spread all through the Bible, especially in the book of Joshua where the people marched around the city seven times and the city’s walls fell down. After that was done, God said, “See what I have given you?”

Mr. Batterson begins his book by telling about a man, Honi, who lived in the first century before Christ was born. A drought was in the land and the eccentric sage still believed God would answer prayer though most of the people living at that time didn’t. Honi drew a circle and kept growing circles around him and then he prayed for rain. He didn’t give up, but prayed for days, sitting inside the circle. Then rain came but it was so heavy that people were complaining so he prayed for a gentle rain and right away the heavy rain turned to a gentle rain. It is a story you would enjoy reading.

Mr. Batterson’s story is about his own circle making prayers and it does work! I have decided many of us could pray that way. America needs our prayers as never before. We could lose all of our freedoms. Many of us have wondered what we could do to change all of this. We are told to “Stand up” often enough and maybe that going to the voting box just isn’t enough. Let’s try drawing a circle around a picture of America and start praying to bring our country back to what it was. We can’t really circle America but with our picture of the circle we can pray, and pray until we see things begin to change and then praise Him for what he has already done. It wouldn’t hurt to fast at the same time!

If this worked for Honi and Mr. Batterson, why wouldn’t it work for us? It will, and I’m going to start by drawing my circles today. How about you?